


SAMSAELIOD

by nocleanspoons



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Aliens, Fancharacters - Freeform, Non-Canonical, Xenos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 06:22:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17198180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nocleanspoons/pseuds/nocleanspoons
Summary: Luthen, a Battle-Brother of the Wild Knights Chapter and loyal son to the Imperium, has been stranded on a roaming space hulk for nearly a century. He arrived accompanied by his brothers, but now he is the sole survivor.He finds himself constantly hounded by a powerful Xenos threat previously unseen by the Imperium. Faced with such a foe, he may just have to accept help from unexpected and largely unwanted allies.





	SAMSAELIOD

**Author's Note:**

> • DRAMATIS PERSONAE •
> 
> Osoro "Two-Sight" Aad ]---------------------------[ Night Lord - Raptor
> 
> Luthen "Two-Bolters" ]----------------------------[ Wild Knight - Apothecary
> 
> Zachen Sohl ]------------------------------------[ Tech Priest - Unaligned

**Prelude**

            A single space marine lurked through the darkness, for once moving as quietly as his weary armor would allow. He couldn’t be perfectly sure, but he knew he was near the outer layers of the space hulk’s shell of brutally twisted hulls. His helm’s flickering visor display warned him that outside the seal of his warplate, the dark chamber was airless and well below freezing. Frost clung to every surface he could see, granting the scenery a ghostly veneer of undisturbed stillness.

            His boots were magnetized to the floor to keep him from slipping, which he absolutely would have done as this particular vessel’s frame was also slanted at a sharp 45° angle. Even with his feet mag-locked to the deck, he found he had to lean to compensate. All around him, the sullen and equally weary architecture of the ship attempted to keep him company. Statues of phantom-like mortals robed in all-concealing cloaks loomed around every corner and adorned every column. Each of them strained emotionlessly in their artistic and eternal task of supporting their vessel’s superstructure.

            It had once been called the Windless Sail. Before it became another captive of the space hulk’s flesh, it had been and seasoned cruiser in service to the Imperial Guard. The astartes knew not when the Sail had become trapped. He did know that he had been here in these very halls once before, almost a century ago.

            He had arrived with one-hundred of his brothers. The Sandhawks, the 4th Company of the Wild Knights Chapter, had embarked on an exploratory mission. They sought the remnants of an ancient Chapter vessel that they believed would contain three of their long-lost brothers; dormant Dreadnoughts from the early days of their founding. Reclamation was their goal, but the battle barge was buried deep, and with no guarantee that their slumbering brothers would even be aboard, the company hesitated.

            The cost for their doubt came mere moments after the full-company deployment to the hulk. The monstrosity of more than fifty crushed ships sank back into the tides of the Immaterium, submerging the Wild Knights along with it. During the one-hundred years since, the hulk had reentered realspace only twice; The first bout outside the Warp lasted two weeks and the second a mere minute and a half.

            In one-hundred years, he’d lost one-hundred brothers. Now, as the sole survivor of the Sandhawks, he passed through the vessel where they had set down their first beachhead. The marks of their brief occupation of the Sail existed all around him, in minute details that only he would recognize. He knew without glancing that he’d see the oil-stains and abandoned equipment of the company’s techmarine tucked away into one corner of the chamber. He could point blind at the exact spot where his mentor, Lord Apothecary _“Mercymaker”_ had first armed him with his own narthecium.

All of these memories were ghosts now. There was no time for ghosts. He had walked for days to get here, but he had not returned for sentimental reasons. He would have preferred to remain deeper in, where oxygen and warmth still existed in the event that his badly-worn armor failed him. He had been forced to come here; a certain distance needed to be maintained between him and what was infesting the core of his prison.

When the 4th Company first encountered the xenos residents of the hulk they had designated them as a new strain of Tyranid, possibly endemic to this particular collection of mangled vessels. They would come to learn that this was inaccurate. The aliens were initially easy to kill. Their insectoid carapace, while resistant to chainblades and claws, was easily cracked by bolter rounds and they fled before the fury of flamer plumes.

 For their weaknesses, they were far more organized and far more advanced than Tyranids. Each individual was a psyker of profound power that wielded weapons hewn from a crystalline substance. Their guns bent reality around themselves and fired pure, armor-nullifying energy.

Each new exchange with the xenos allowed them to learn the patterns and styles of astartes war-making. Such knowledge seemed to spread through the alien infection in moments. What at first seemed to be an inexperienced and soft-bodied species soon became a swift, formidable, and highly-adaptive enemy. The Company Captain had granted them the moniker of _“blackjackets”_ and declared righteous war upon them while they all hurled through the Warp. This war would be the last for all but one of the hawks.

The space hulk, designated the SAMSAELIOD by the Wild Knights, had been a nest lying in wait for more meat to consume. Following the consumption of the company, the blackjackets’ numbers exploded across the space hulk. The more territory they claimed, the harder it became to run from them. Soon there would be nowhere left to hide.

The lone space marine knew he would die somewhere in this hulk’s countless depths. It was only a matter of time.

 

 

 

**Chapter I**

**Brother Mine**

           

Life had become a paradoxical existence between the debilitating loneliness and the constant reminders that he was never alone. Even now, after a century, the quiet set his teeth on edge. Silence did not designate safety, it simply suggested the enemy had taken up stealth tactics. But he was flagging.

He needed to rest. _Just for a moment_ , he promised himself. His armor growled around his form as he leaned against the wall of a corridor passage. The frost was lesser here than it had been back in the Sail’s prime chapel, but the cold had not subsided. He felt the raking pains of muscle fatigue and starvation shoot through his body in this moment of pause. Such reprieves were rare for the lone astartes, and in many ways resting was far _far_ worse than continued movement. Not least of all because the enemy _never_ stopped moving.

But his body was starting to fight him over every step forward. His legs ached from hip to heel, and his power armor felt heavier by the minute. He found it more and more difficult to read the runes on his visor, at times he wasn’t sure he was holding his bolter anymore. His mind wandered and blanked at every opportunity, and more than once he spotted figures moving in his peripherals that had somehow gone below the detection of his helm.

The Wild Knight knew he would not be able to avoid sleeping for much longer. It had been almost three weeks since he last rested, and that was only an afforded hour of incredibly fortunate time.

 _Just for a moment._ He felt one of his knees slam against the floor but didn’t register that he had gone down until several seconds after. He glanced at the surveillance radial in the corner of his vision to be sure his vicinity was clear, but he never saw it. Consciousness fled him all at once, leaving him in a dizzied haze of black, half-awake and half-comatose by exhaustion. His Catalepsean Node jerked him back to partial awareness of his surroundings, but he found no will to rise.

How simple it would be to just lie down and sleep until the bugs caught up with him. They’d surely end him before he could wake and release him from this hell at last.

 

_No._

 

He shook his head limply, shoving away the repulsive notion of such a pitiful death. His fist squeezed around the grip of his bolter and he grounded himself in the weight of the weapon. His eyes flicked wearily up to the chronometer at the peak of his visor and confirmed that he’d only been out of it for a few minutes, but already another blackout was tugging at his mind.

Suddenly there came a sound. His battle-conditioned mind was cleared instantly. His paired hearts gave a powerful beat in his chest, sending adrenaline coursing through his veins fast enough to haul him back to reality. He glanced the corridor, disoriented by his body’s abrupt reaction. He spotted no hostile reads on his visor, and no disturbances in the environment.

The sound came again, instantly recognizable; a live bolter.

            His body rose on tensed muscles and he turned, looking back the way he came as the distant sound of gunfire rattled the Sail’s bones. The staccato barks came to a quiet end, and for a horrifying moment the Wild Knight thought he’d imagined it. But again the firing returned to rescue him from the terror.

 

            _Wait…_

He jerked forward, his legs running on pure instinct to carry him forward, toward that bolter. He knew that gun. The clipped cadence on the third round, the moment’s pause that followed the sixth.

 _Argail? Argail?!_ His breath caught in his throat as he sprinted back through the chapel and the tangle of hallways that he’d limped down only moments before. His armor whined all around him, pleading him to tread carefully. Runes went live across his visual feed, warning him of micro-faults in his ceramite that might bloom into actual problems if he continued this course of action. He ignored them.

That was his brother’s bolter, he was sure of it. So powerful was his certainty that all other thoughts were silenced by its urgency. It didn’t matter _how_ Argail had survived, or _why_ his bolter was now live, all that mattered was reaching him.

The space marine crashed down a series of bunk-room halls, headed for what he knew to be the weapons-loading platform that once serviced the cruiser’s guns. It had been empty when he made his way through it, and even now his visor was predicting only hostiles beyond the bulkhead doors. He didn’t care, if he was to meet his end here then so be it. He wanted to be with his brother again, even if it was only to die together.

The doors screeched open on the remains of their energy supply, just barely fast enough to suit the Wild Knight’s needs as he barreled between them. He came to a halt at the edge of a landing platform, his bulk only prevented from tumbling over the side by a railing of iron. His eyes frantically scoured the chamber spread out below him, and his visor lit up with red sigils and reticules locking onto targets. Blackjackets were flooding into the munitions hub at one end as a wave of black-shelled bodies.

A headache throbbed in the back of the space marine’s head as he looked upon them. Their collective psychic presence was so potent that it brushed even his psychically inactive mind with pain. He tore his gaze from the xenos hoard. His body was moving toward one of the stair columns that would take him down, though he still hadn’t spotted Argail.

He could hear the bolter’s roaring loud and clear. He followed the sound to a space below his entry point and leapt entire lengths of stairs in his race towards it. At last his helm’s visor locked onto the shape of another astartes in the dark. He stood at the edge of another landing platform, unloading bolter rounds into the encroaching xenos ranks. He stood before a bulkhead door that was too damaged to open wide enough to fit his bulk.

The Wild Knight’s helm immediately informed him that this other space marine had suffered severe damage to his armor, but he nearly missed that information as he reached the bottom of the stairs. He extended an arm out to the other, his hearts and his mind racing out of his control.

“Argail!” He shouted through his helm’s vox, and the sound emerged as a coarse snarl from his long-unused throat. The other astartes glanced at him and flinched, clearly fighting the reflex to turn the bolter in his hand on the Knight. “To the top! There’s an open way!”

The other space marine’s helm angled upward. In an instant, he had leapt from where he stood and soared on mechanized jet propulsion to the top-most platform. The Wild Knight stepped back, sparing only a moment to ponder when Argail had acquired a jump-pack. He whirled around, acutely aware of the threat rushing through the chamber toward him. Moving with speed and agility that he no longer thought he possessed, the Knight summited the stairwells and hurled himself through the still-open doors of the passage he had entered through.

He paused for only a moment to seal the doors from within and then locked down the wall panel by overloading the door’s systems with redundant commands, a trick his techmarine brother had taught him before he was lost. Undoing the machine spirit’s confusion would require the direct aid of a Tech Priest, and the Blackjackets did not excel at cutting through Imperial steel. They would break through in time, but the Knight intended to be long gone with his brother by then.

 He sprinted into the dark, bypassing the old chapel once more. He exited the holy place through an ambulatory door at the rear of the chamber, following the scraping boot-marks left in the frost. He searched the distant labyrinth of corridors for the place that Argail had retreated to, and found the other astartes slumped against a supporting statuette at the cross-section of two halls. He leaned heavily on one arm and made ragged, desperate pants through his vox. The Knight could tell from just his breathing that he was in great pain.

Such affinity for the suffering of others is what brought the Mercymaker’s attention to him as an apprentice. The sympathetic ache that the Knight felt for his found-brother brought him to his knees beside the other astartes. His hands fell upon the other’s armor, searching in the darkness for what caused his kin such agony.

“Show me, brother.” He rasped, hoping that Argail could hear the comfort he intended his words to have, despite the hollow sound his unused voice had become. “Show me where. I don’t feel any punctures in your armor.” His fingers ghosted over a few of the emergency releases on the other astartes’ surface plates. “Let me see.” he jumped as his wrist was suddenly seized tight in a ceramite grip.

“Are you stupid?” the other astartes hissed. “Don’t remove my plate…” he struggled to fill his lungs with enough air to quench his pains. “Give me inhibitors… The fight’s not done.” His words were punctuated by the distant, echoing crash of xenos attempting to rip through a sealed bulkhead. “Hurry, apothecary…”

Something in the Wild Knight’s mind drew back from the other astartes while he armed his narthecium. He could not understand why, the pure euphoria of being reunited with one of his brothers deadened every thought in his head that wasn’t devoted to keeping Argail safe. He felt along the other space marine’s leg until he felt the injection port on his outer thigh. The needle-bolt of his gauntlet punctured the seal of the other’s armor for a mere second, delivering a full dose of pain-killing serum to his body. The brother sighed with immediate relief and attempted to rise.

“We can’t fight them, brother. There are too many.” The Wild Knight helped his companion onto his feet as he glanced down the unlit corridor they had taken cover in. “We can fall back. I know a place we can go.”

 “Running away? Hiding? That’s not very ‘loyalist’ of you.” The other astartes chuckled with an inflection the Knight couldn’t quite place. It sounded… malicious. “So be it, _brother_. Lead the way.”

 

He turned to look at Argail…

 

No…

 

He turned to look at this stranger who stood beside him in the dark, his red eye-lenses staring through the void with predatory focus. The Knight truly _saw_ the other space marine in this moment. The shape of his armor, barely discernible from the shadows around him bore the wicked angles and imagery of webbed wings. The jump-pack on his back crested high over his helm like two screeching mouths. The fanged mouth-grille of his helm snarled angrily, and Argail’s battered bolter hung from his grip.

“Night Lord.” The Wild Knight’s mind ordered his body to strike the treacherous bastard, but it seemed exhaustion had caught up with him again. All he could manage was a single step backward. He found he could barely raise his own gun. “ _Traitor._ ”

The Night Lord snorted hatefully at him. “Come now, you were _very_ brotherly just now.” His mockery was cut short by the sound of metal rending apart from half a ship-length away. “…We’ve no time for this. You spoke of a fallback, take us there.”

“I will not aid a traitor.”

“You already have, you fucking fool.” The sneer behind his words was loud and clear. “Don’t be an idiot. This is hardly the place for political debate.”

“ _Give me that bolter_.” The Wild Knight growled at the traitor marine, his hands forming fists. The Night Lord groaned with annoyance and turned to face the long and deep darkness of the Sail’s maze-like veins that would, in time, deliver their doom directly to their feet.

“No.” The traitor breathed heavy, his posture and movements nursing the pains of his invisible injuries. “So. Are you ready to die then, loyalist? Ready to give your life just to spite a single rogue astartes where no one will ever learn of your valiant sacrifice?” He checked the chamber of Argail’s weapon once, and then again out of paranoia. “What a fine fucking hill you’ve chosen for us both.” Beside the traitor, his noble counterpart glanced back down the passage. The Wild Knight could tell his bluff was being called as the sounds of xenos welled up and ebbed. They had pierced he bulkhead and spilled in, and now they would search the Windless Sail for the psychic trails of their prey.

His hearts quickened in his chest and he could feel the adrenaline subsiding from his system with every moment spent just standing here. The urge to strike down this heretic clashed with the deeply bestial instinct to flee into the safety of a warren. He felt sick, weak, and not nearly awake enough for what was about to unfold. His eyes darted all too-slowly between the Night Lord and the dark maws of hallways all around them. In a moment of supreme doubt, he asked himself the Night Lord’s own question; was he ready to die like this?

No.

 

The Wild Knight whirled around on his heels and bolted down an adjoining corridor. He thought he heard the Night Lord chuckle as he turned to follow him through the narrow pass.

 

 

◊◊◊

 

 

They had been running for almost fifteen minutes when the Night Lord started to suspect that his guide was lost. He seemed to be choosing their route at random, with no real indication of which direction was their ultimate one. The loyalist had already solidly mistaken him for one of his Chapter-brothers, who knew what else had gone wrong in his silly little head.

“Where are you _taking_ us, Loyal?” he was several paces behind the other astartes and didn’t know how well his voice carried over the sound of their thundering boots. The xenos had become an ever-present and maddening drone of noise all around them. For his part, the fool seemed rather adept at navigating around them through the tangle of corridors.

All at once the winding hallways gave way to a thread-bare skeletal wound that spanned several decks. Even from deep within the scar itself, it was easy to identify this wreckage as the spot where the Sail had snapped in two against the SAMSAELIOD’s prow. The Night Lord slowed a step in his canter to look upward at all the possible perches and boltholes he could utilize to leave the loyalist and this whole damn mess behind. Before he could finish the thought, he heard the crash of xenos spilling into the scar in their wake.

He turned to fire pot-shots into a gang of them that were emerging from the amputated corridors like insects from a proper hive. Their carapace hides shattered in little bursts of organic shrapnel, and psychic screeches tore through his mind on every impact. Ahead of him, he heard the loyalist shout something over the howling of the aliens.

He turned forward just in time to see the Wild Knight stopped at the serrated edge of their current path. He gazed across a vast expanse of open air to a paired piece of torn decking that once connected the two halves of the ship. The gap yawned, far too wide to cross with any ordinary leap of faith. Working on the purest instincts he had, the Night Lord barreled forward. He extended an arm, grabbing the loyalist at the waist before his jump pack roared to life.

They were suddenly airborne, rocketing across the scar through the weak gravity enforced by the space hulk’s sheer size. The loyalist shouted something– likely some kind of insult, but the Night Lord’s focus was singular as he struggled to steer them toward their landing point. They hit the decking hard as his pack’s thrusters dropped them. The combined weight of two fully armored astartes wasn’t something the piece of gear was prepared for, but even so the traitor stuck his landing.

The Wild Knight was tossed. He skidded across the slanted floor until he caught himself on a mangled piece of floor paneling. By the time he rose, the Night Lord was already firing across the gap into the hoard of xenos that had swarmed the platform in their place. He hauled himself up into a crouch and brought his bolter to bear. He laid fire into the bulk of the xenos flood and watched as they came right to the edge of oblivion.

Many of them were forced to stop swarming to evaluate the distance they’d need to leap in order to reach their prey. The moment’s pause was opportunity enough for the two astartes to whittle back the first lines. Their wounded bodies plummeted downward in heaps. The Wild Knight’s helm highlighted the ones that still lived as they fell, but he paid them no mind. Such a long fall into the mangled depths was a guaranteed death, even for these durable creatures. Even as they began losing ground, the aliens kept pressing forward stubbornly.

The Wild Knight’s shots rang out in a percussive duet with Argail’s bolter, now clutched by a traitor. The twinned, booming beat put a knot of anger and sorrow in his gut for the brother he’d come so close to recovering. He tried to push it down, to put it away– but the swell of emotion would not be tamed. He felt tears welling in his eyes, blurring his vision.

The Knight’s weak attention was yanked to the magazine-linked feed on his helm’s visor. The last of his ammunition was depleting swiftly, and the xenos had not halted in their flow. While he was watching his bolt shells click down, he saw out of the corner of his eye the shape of a larger xenos make the dangerous leap over the gap. His sights locked onto the first attempted jumper with precision focus. It was all he could do to bring his bolter to the correct aim. The creature would not have hit its mark anyway, but the astartes made a point of blasting away part of its torso before it dropped past their perch, disappearing into the dark below.

The Night Lord didn’t need to check to know that his own mag-counter was dropping far lower than he was comfortable with. With a muttered a curse against his grille-piece, he grasped the last plasma grenade clipped at his hip. He took a step back from the edge of the platform. flicked the explosive’s pin from its chamber and hurled it hard toward the central mass of xenos.

Those that spotted the grenade tried to pull back– only to find themselves pressed against an opposing wall of those who had not. There were screams both audible and psychic that prefaced the ignition of a small sun’s supernova; heat and light devoured everything in the vicinity. In the wake of the plasma eruption, the xenos wailed in glorious pain. Burning, twitching corpses tumbled over the edges of the platform and those severely wounded survivors of the impact were grabbed and dragged back. With cowardly swiftness, the remaining aliens sacrificed their position and retreated from the fight. Their howls of indignation and rage carried on the stale air as they burrowed back into the Sail’s veins.

The Night Lord released a stiff breath, and then lowered Argail’s bolter. He turned to see where his guide had landed and caught the first queasy rock of the Wild Knight’s body. The loyalist had doubled forward, his movements had become sluggish and uncoordinated. At first the Night Lord wondered if he’d been struck by a stray shot from the xenos, but the Knight wasn’t grasping at any wound; he only seemed suddenly and wholly drunk.

“On your feet. Take us forward.” The traitor growled through his helm as he stood over the floored loyalist. His words didn’t seem to reach the other astartes, and before he could repeat himself the Wild Knight’s body crumpled forward. He became motionless, his bolter loosely gripped by his opened fist. “…Loyalist?” the Night Lord crouched beside him and reached out to grab him by the faceplate. When such disrespect elicited no reaction, the traitor removed the helm.

The seals dislodged with weak hisses, and the piece came slipping off. The Wild Knight’s eyes were closed, and his face was plastered with the serene mask of sleep. He barely even twitched as the freezing, oxygen-depleted air brushed against his skin. The Night Lord stayed crouched there, musing for a moment about letting the loyalist suffocate. It was all he deserved after passing out like this.

“What a waste of time.” He glanced down the Wild Knight’s armor in the hopes of finding something worth salvaging, only to find that this Astartes’ gear and supply was in a much worse shape than his own. Dismayed, he grunted and examined the helm clutched in his talons. He could hear the rasping failure of the other astartes lungs as they attempted to pull oxygen from the dead air. Out of either amusement or indecision, he simply listened to the unconscious loyalist slowly starting to asphyxiate.

He glanced up at the open scar around them and the flesh of other victim vessels that were poorly grafted over it. He could choose any one of the hundreds of amputated passages he could see from here. He could disappear and take up stealthier tactics going forward in order to avoid more disasters like the one he’d just miraculously survived. He’d find a way to keep ahead of the xenos. He needn’t stay.

Though, on the other hand, this loyalist had clearly been surviving here for longer. The state of his armor and loadout were decidedly poor, but he’d lived. Just as well, he _had_ technically facilitated the Night Lord’s own survival. Perhaps he’d be more useful alive than dead– astartes were force multipliers after all, two of them would generate more ‘luck’ for both of them in the future. But was it worth the indignation or the irritation?

He sat thinking for a moment, going back and forth in his own mind while staring at the paling features of his guide. His slumbering breaths had become labored. His lips blued with oxygen deprivation. Remarkably, he remained asleep. Just how close to dying was this fool, anyhow?

“…Waste not.” The Night Lord half-sighed, half-growled as he grabbed the loyalist by the collar and re-fixed his helm into place. The seals clicked, and the Wild Knight’s grille growled with a deep breath of properly oxygenated air.

 


End file.
